“But you? how about you?”
“How about me?” she repeated. “You know that for the present my malady seems to be at a standstill; whether owing or not to the treatment I have been undergoing I cannot tell; personally I believe it to be only what I suppose would be called a reprieve, and that the operation, which lately seemed imminent, is only deferred for a more or less brief period. Anyhow, the fact remains, that I have no longer an excuse for avoiding duties disagreeable or otherwise; and I believe the case we are discussing comes under one or other of those heads.”
There could be no doubt in the husband’s mind under which head the return of Miss Ransome was mentally classed by his wife, though she magnanimously refrained from specifying it.
“It is like you to propose it,” he answered slowly; but more laggingly still, “I cannot see why you should embitter your life for the sake of a person who, after all, has no real claim upon you.”
Camilla looked at him with a calm compassion, accurately gauging what an utterance in such absolute discord with his own clearly divined inclinations had cost him.
“My life is not so easily embittered,” she rejoined quietly, “and I have never wished or expected personal enjoyment to have a very prominent part in my programme—you need not feel any disquiet on that head—and besides”—her usual rigid truthfulness combining with a wish to meet her companion’s self-sacrificing utterance in a like spirit to produce the concluding, “and besides, there is much about the girl as an inmate that is not disagreeable to me.”
If he had followed his impulses, he would have broken out into emphatic expressions of gratitude; but realizing just in time what a frightful lapse from taste and seemliness it would involve to accept as a personal kindness done to himself the contemplated step, he refrained.
“It shall be, of course, as you wish,” he said, and so left the room.
He left the house too, the confinement of walls and roof seeming unbearable. He must have open air and solitude in which to bring himself face to face with the new prospect, at which in his wife’s presence he had trusted himself to give only a glance. What right had he to think it so fair? He must call mightily upon Reason and Honour to cudgel him, if necessary, out of so mad and ruinous a belief. But they might cudgel him as they would—and they did belabour him soundly during the next hour—nothing could hinder him from looking at the Great Scheme of Things from a different standpoint to that with which he had regarded it as he remorsefully followed his too-little-loved sister’s hearse! Since those moments of woolly despair what had happened to better his lot or brighten his prospects? What had happened, but that a young girl of vicious origin and upbringing, standing upon a hopelessly low plane of thought and action, a young girl who had brought discomfort and scandal into his home, alienated his friends, and poisoned his wife’s peace, was to be given the opportunity of pursuing and completing her work of disintegration! What but this had happened to make “the March sun shine like May,” to turn the dry easterly blast into a zephyr? Reason and Honour combined to answer emphatically, “Nothing, less than nothing!” but another voice out-shouted them, dumbing them with its insistent joyous asseveration, “Everything!” This voice was so impossible to silence, that at last he was reduced to listening to it, to asking it what it had to say for itself; and it began lengthily to explain. There were, certainly, disadvantages inseparable from the girl’s resumption of her place at his fireside—he tried to school himself into treating her in his innermost thoughts merely as “the girl”—but there would be good to be extracted from it too, if it was taken in the right way. Never could she hope to be under such wholesome and elevating an influence as his wife’s; and he himself might do something too, if he took the relation in the right way. Everything depended on taking it in the right way! He would begin at once—the very next time that they met—to set it upon a safe basis; to give the keynote of their future intercourse, and, with her extraordinary quickness and brightness, she would at once catch the right tone and keep it. God knows he had tried to do his best for her; to give her some notion of honour and truth, and decent living; and he had made some progress. She lied still, but she said fewer indecent things; and she tried with such sweet docility to see his point of view, when she managed to grasp what it was.
Thank God, he had nothing to reproach himself with, nothing, that is, that was visible or audible to any human eye or ear; but sometimes the ground had seemed to be crumbling into sand under his feet. Henceforth the foundation on which he and she were together to stand was to be of granite; and if, by-and-by, he were to succeed—he and his wife together—in leading her on and up, till her mind and moral nature more nearly matched her exquisite body, what an entrancing little friend she would make for them both! how she would soothe and brighten their waning years!